Behind the scenes at Atvero: Marcus Roberts & Atvero Mail

Marcus Roberts, Head of Atvero, was fed up with how emails are managed—or rather, not managed—within the AEC industry, so he decided to develop a solution.  

We caught up with Marcus to find out more.  

In simple terms, how would you explain the challenges of email management?

“Imagine you buy a fridge alone, and they email you the receipt, you then have that receipt in your records. Now, imagine you and your partner buy a fridge; the receipt could be in either of your inboxes, creating two places to search down the line.

If you need to return the fridge and your partner is away on an ‘off the grid’ holiday as people now do, you have to wait until they return to get the receipt, potentially missing the return deadline. Worse, you’ve broken up and gone no contact - they have the receipt, and you’re stuck with a broken fridge.

To make it a bit more business related, swap out the fridge for: contracts, change orders, etc. with 10+ inboxes to check and have access too.”  

Having access to someone else's inbox, rather than a shared environment, sounds like a long-winded way to get the information needed?

“It is! Accessing someone's personal inbox if they are away, say on holiday, often needs HR approval and is not a quick task. It’s a very common issue in the AEC industry, and having information trapped out of reach can seriously delay project progression.”

You also use the analogy of a breakup - could you expand on that?

“Breaking up in the business sense is the equivalent of them leaving the company they are with. You can’t keep their mailbox without keeping a license assigned. The old way was to “PST” the mailbox: write it out as a .PST file that can be attached to your Outlook so you can read all their email. But now you can see all their personal emails too – so it’s not unknown for people to delete everything in their inbox the day they leave!”

You definitely don’t want someone deleting everything, particularly anything that might be needed down the line. Is access to this information the core of email management for you?

“Partially, yes. For me email management is about three core things. Firstly, accessing information that has the potential to be locked away in someone’s inbox is essential, so nothing is lost or deleted.

Secondly, having a single place to find things. Imagine searching for emails related to a project that has run for seven years across multiple people’s inboxes. What do you even begin with? My aim for Atvero Mail was to create a space where you can find all emails relating to a specific project, and search and refine it. It also assists by giving you the names of all the people involved so you can follow up or use it as a search starting point.

Thirdly, in litigation situations, you will be able to hand over the entire project email folder over to the lawyers, avoiding massive time sinks collating all related project emails!”

Does anything affect whether a practice needs an email management system?

“Yes, the need for an email management system increases as the practice grows. The more projects you have, the more people you have working on them, so there is more correspondence, documentation and drawings. A key email agreeing a change could have gone to one person in a team of twenty, so there are already 20 inboxes to search. Now imagine that grows to 200 inboxes.”

What makes email management so easily overlooked and why is it so important?

“Everyone hates filing emails! It’s a chore, it’s boring, it takes away from actual creative work. On some systems it can lock up Outlook while it chugs away.

You could use the oldest tech, public folders, etc. Everyone just drags and drops project-related emails into the project folder. But this makes it difficult to manage security, manage who has access to what, find relevant information, search, tag, track duplicates - and it's extremely error prone.

The dream with Atvero Mail was to create a service that assisted with emails. Having a system suggest where to file stuff, assume all emails in a conversation relate to the same project, and auto file them reduces time, errors, and increases overall productivity. It also alerts you to duplications and deduplicates, reducing the number of exact copies stacking up.

We also built on top of Outlook to assure accessibility from anywhere. We all have Outlook on our computers, phones, and tablets - so we wanted to guarantee that nothing would be missed due to location.”

You have spent the majority of your career in IT and software - has this inspired Atvero Mail in any way?

“Nothing makes your heart sink faster as an IT professional than being asked to find emails relating to a project from 7 years ago. No one can remember the project code/name even. The three people who worked on it have left. Oh, and it was during the time you were on the email system that came before the one before you moved to the cloud.

I’ve been there. You might be finding CD or DVD backups. You might be pulling a box of DAT tapes out of a long forgotten safe in the basement – and you definitely don’t have a working DAT machine anymore. Even once you can read that data off the ancient media, you don’t have a working version of the email system to read it with.

These experiences definitely inspired me to make sure Atvero Mail was online and cloud-based, browsable, and searchable. For the IT enthusiasts out there it’s in a data neutral format that you can search easily, and open with an email client (or even a text editor!).”

Do you have any final words about email management or Atvero Mail?

“A bit like insurance when you’re headed off on holiday, the last thing on your mind is what can go wrong, and it feels like an extra expense.  But when you need it, you really need it!

What I love about Atvero Mail is that filing an email doesn’t make it less accessible, it makes it more accessible, to both you and your team, for the long term.”